Mega Borg oil spill
man-made disaster
The Mega Borg oil spill occurred in the Gulf of Mexico on June 8, 1990, roughly 50 miles off the coast of Texas, when the oil tanker Mega Borg caught on fire and exploded. The cleanup was one of the first practical uses of bioremediation.
Initial explosion and cause
At 11:30 PM on the evening of Friday June 8, 1990, an explosion in the cargo room of the Norwegian oil tanker the Mega Borg “ruptured the bulkhead between the pump room and the engine room”, causing the ship to catch fire and begin to leak oil. The 853-foot-long, 15-year-old vessel was about 50 miles off the coast of Galveston, Texas when the explosion occurred. The weather at the time was calm and the tanker had easily passed Coast Guard safety inspections in April earlier that year. While the direct cause of the engine room explosion remains unknown, the initial blast occurred during a lightering process in which the Mega Borg was transferring oil onto a smaller Italian tanker, the Fraqmura, in order to then transport the oil to Houston. This transfer was necessary, as the Mega Borg was too large to dock at the Texas port. Three million gallons of the total 38 million gallons of light Angolan Palanca crude oil on board the tanker were able to be transferred to the Fraqmura before the blast.
Two days after the initial blast, there were five successive explosions in a ten-minute window. These explosions greatly increased the rate of the spill from the tanker into the water.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mega Borg oil spill” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.